Tuesday in Dublin, and I spy a Sigerson Cup game in Grangegorman at 7pm. It’s to be shown live on the Sigerson Cup YouTube page, but it’s also happening maybe 20 minutes away from my house in the car. It’s January 7th, in a freezing cold snap, but I’ve done stupider things than this - much stupider - in the name of the GAA.
The decisive factor, in the end, was the choice of the Higher Education Championships to play this year’s colleges football competitions under the old rules, thereby losing their competition one customer, who would have used his press pass to get around the money-men at the gate anyway. The fools, the fools!
This was my frame of mind on Tuesday (before I found out the game was cancelled in any case due to the weather), that the competition had missed a trick by not adopting the new ‘enhancements’. There is a rampant curiosity out there to see a football game right now, any game – to kick the tyres of our new sport, see it in action, roar at a ref or two, expose your knowledge gaps to all and sundry.
Think of the publicity the competition would have attracted. Imagine the YouTube numbers. The UL manager Declan Brouder agreed with me, saying on X last month that opting to play the 2024 iteration of the sport was a “huge opportunity lost for [the] Sigerson Cup competition in 2025”.
I shared this thought with a few people involved in third level this week . . . and was abruptly told to shut up and sit down. This may have touched a nerve with those involved in colleges’ GAA. YouTube numbers are all well and good, but the Sigerson Cup has been on the go for the last 100 years or more. It is a competition with a rich history of its own. It might seem to be perennially under fire given how tightly squeezed the entire GAA season is, but it is perhaps more sure of itself than its precarious position in the calendar would suggest.
There was another calendar-related issue to contend with – the competition had, in a sense, already begun by the time the changes were brought in. The pre-Christmas third level leagues determine seedings in the championship, and games had been played in that competition before the GAA Special Congress had been held.
Another issue raised with me was the lack of on-pitch training time you get as the manager of a third-level team. Put bluntly, the county teams have their county players, and the colleges see them when they see them. That often means you’re deprived of the whole spine of your team for weeks on end.
They may be off with some other team (be it senior or U20 county outfits) training under the new order, but they will have had no opportunity to bed in with their school team-mates and get a picture of how those new rules affect that particular team until game time. This, I had to admit, was not something I had really thought about.
But there was a deeper issue at play. Colleges games have in the past been regularly used as proving grounds for hastily-assembled tweaks, most recently the freshers hurling tournament last year, which featured new diktats around the handpass, and a rule ensuring all puck-outs went past the 45 metre line.
This was how changes used to be trialled in the GAA – suggested in a boardroom, foisted on an unwilling test environment, to be duly ripped apart by managers in that competition who, whatever about the rights and wrongs of the rule tweaks themselves, felt the tournament they were playing in was owed more respect than that.
There are traces of that attitude apparent in how Sigerson Cup managers have approached this season – ‘we’re not going to be the test-lab again’. But the horse has bolted. Whatever about a lack of training-time with your full squad, your best players are still off training with someone else . . . under the new rules.
The All-Ireland club football championships are in the final stages of a year-long competition, and so have a more compelling argument to see out the season with the old rules. Their county players will have largely stayed with their clubs throughout this winter, so they’re not criss-crossing between what are now effectively two different sports.
The Sigerson Cup may have been seeded according to league play, but the competition proper still only started this week. Going with the new changes was worth the punt.
And though the competition has muddled along just fine for a century without any real sustained interest from the outside world, the absence of the preseason provincial competitions did give this year’s Sigerson Cup a major leg-up. They may not feel they need promotion, or big crowds, but they should hardly run away from those things either.
It doesn’t take a particularly brave man or woman to suggest that the next 10 years could easily see an explosion in interest in third level GAA. The quality of player has always been there, the stage has now been cleared for them with no preseason competitions, and the drip-drip of online TV coverage is surely only going to grow and expand. They may shrug their shoulders at the idea of a wider audience, but crowds bring clout. And in an ever tighter games window, that’s important.
These new rules would have won them plenty of eyeballs.
